Autumn 2011 - Mandy Mazliah

Raising children
The Rise of the Threenager
Think the twos are terrible?
Just wait till you have a threeyear-old
says Ali Cronin…
First, a disclaimer. My three-year-old
is loving and funny and she fills my
heart with joy. I know how lucky I am
to have her. The parents I spoke to
for this piece all said similar.
But man, they’re hard work. As Rae,
mum to Samuel, three, put it: “I
wish someone had warned me that
three-year-olds are infinitely more
challenging than twos.”
Two year olds may hit, scratch,
bite, wee in dirty protest and be
impossible to reason with. But three
year olds… Well, it gets a whole
lot more psychological. They have
the ability to hit you where it hurts,
whether through embarrassment,
insult or good old-fashioned
violence.
Lying on the floor in a shop and
shouting, “I AM NOT A SERVANT!”
when asked to do something.
Refusing to get dressed or to eat.
Point-blank ignoring you. Hitting
you / their younger sibling. Telling
you they want a different mummy.
Greeting your end-of-tether shouting
with a bored stare. Still refusing
to share. All favourite tools of the
threenager.
You know you’ll never smack and
you vowed you’d never shout. This
is the time when the former is really
put to the test (when someone kicks
you in the back, your first instinct
is to hit back) and the second goes
out of the window. Yet shouting is
like water off a duck’s back to your
brave, bolshy three year old.
So how can we handle our
threenager? And why, please, are
they so horrible?
It turns out that two- and threeyear-olds
really are mini teenagers.
Both stages of development – from
baby to child and from child to adult
- involve brain reconstruction on a
truly massive scale: far more than at
any other age. Hardly surprising that
our three-year-old gets a bit stroppy.
And three-year-olds are in a difficult
place, developmentally. They have
moved on from the terrible twos
in that they have more empathy
for others, better language skills
and can express themselves more
effectively. But at the same time
they are still battling with some of
the same issues as their two-yearold
peers, including wanting to
have more independence than they
can handle and not knowing how
to stand up for themselves without
resorting to violence or tantrums.
So why are three-year-olds more
difficult than twos?
That’ll be because of their greater
ability to personalise their arsenal
of psychological weaponry teamed
with a residual inability to handle
their emotions. And when you factor
in milestones like starting pre-school
or nursery, it is easy to see why our
threenager gives us a hard time.
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